People celebrate as they watch a live TV broadcast on Wednesday in Srebrenica, when U.N. judges announce the life sentence in the trial of former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide and war crimes in the brutal Balkans conflicts over two decades ago.

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People celebrate as they watch a live TV broadcast on Wednesday in Srebrenica, when U.N. judges announce the life sentence in the trial of former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide and war crimes in the brutal Balkans conflicts over two decades ago.

Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Updated at 8 a.m. ET

After a 5 1/2-year trial, the former Bosnian Serb military commander blamed for orchestrating the murders of thousands of ethnic Muslims has learned his own fate.

On Wednesday morning, judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague handed down a guilty verdict for one count of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war, out of the 11 counts against 74-year-old Ratko Mladic, for his role as a general in the Yugoslav army and chief of staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, the ethnically Serb entity in Bosnia.

The three-judge panel found him not guilty on one of the two counts of genocide and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Minutes before the verdict was to be read, Mladic, 74, shouted, “This is all lies, you are all liars,” and was removed from the courtroom.

Mladic will appeal, his lawyer told reporters from Reuters and the Associated Press.

In a summary of the verdict, Judge Alphons Orie said the crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity.”

Those who suffered in Mladic’s military campaign to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of Muslims and Croats during the country’s civil war from 1992 to 1995 had said they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a life sentence for the man dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia.”

Former Bosnian military chief Ratko Mladic was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday for genocide and crimes against humanity.

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Former Bosnian military chief Ratko Mladic was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Michel Porro/Getty Images

One of Mladic’s defense attorneys, Dragan Ivetic, had tried to postpone the appearance, warning the stress might kill his client. But chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz refused, saying survivors and victims, many of whom traveled to The Hague for the event, deserved to hear the judges’ decision.

After being indicted in 1995, Mladic went on the run, evading the long arm of the Hague tribunal until 2011, when he was discovered by Serb special forces hiding in a house owned by one of his relatives in a village in northern Serbia.

He’d been living under an assumed name for 16 years. But pressure from the European Union on Belgrade over its desire to join the bloc had heightened the government’s ambition to find him.

Inside The Hague tribunal that Mladic called “satanic” and refused to recognize, the former general came face to face with some of the very people he’d tried to wipe out in his effort to rid the country of non-Serbs.

The first witness against Mladic, Elvedin Pasic, was 14 when Bosnian Serb forces took over his village of Grabovica in 1992. Pasic said they burned down homes with people inside them. They shot his dog and stole all his family’s belongings.

After being rounded up, Pasic huddled with his mother in a school gymnasium, but his father and all the other village men were hauled off in buses, never to be seen again.

“There is no doubt in my mind they all died,” Pasic told the court through tears in 2012.